I’ve been a fan of Robert LePage‘s theatrical work since I was fifteen and saw Les Aiguilles et L’Opium with my French class. So I felt like an idiot for not buying tickets soon enough to the Montreal premiere of Le Dragon Bleu, his most recent work with Marie Michaud. I dithered over when to go and who to go with and by the time I got around to it, the show was 100% sold out– a fact that gnawed at me until finally, I decided to get on a bus and go see it Saturday in English, at the NAC in Ottawa.
It’s hard for me to comment on LePage shows because on the one hand, all he has to do is show up and I’m happy, but on the other, there’s nothing he can do to surpass Les Aiguilles et L’Opium, either because it was really that good or because I’ll never be fifteen again, seeing it for the first time, pinning the programme up in my locker, digging through microfiche reviews of his other work at the library on Sundays (oh, my mis-spent youth…). What was on the stage and what did I bring to the experience through my own viewing? I’ll never know for sure.
What has remained consistent all this time, to my mind, is that in LePage’s brand of storytelling, symbolism is explored so thoroughly and knit so tightly into story, it almost becomes the story itself. Symbols are offered up to the audience as anchors on which to tether interpretations and meanings, turning the theatre into a dark box filled with images against which to contemplate one’s own gnawing thoughts as a second story unfolds on stage.
The Blue Dragon starts and ends with calligraphy and thunder, maple syrup and triple outcomes. It presents a love triangle that stands out as much for its lack of romanticism as for the precedence that love– deep, unpretty, forgiving, compassionate, inadequate & healing– takes over conflict. Bleak for most of its two hour run time, it ends on a suddenly comic note that is almost absurd in its abruptness. The play at times feels incomplete or self-negating. A few character changes lack motivation or explanation. And yet, it has power.
I carried my week into the theatre with me, and was struck by some uncanny similarities between this performance and the RubberBanDance piece I saw on Tuesday. The two had in common: their multi-disciplinary natures (both shows incorporate theatre, dance, film and narative in different measures), an unfinished quality, a hopelessness that is either righted or undone in the final, urgent, unanticipated seconds of the work. But was it really all on the stage, or did I think it there because I needed it? I’ll never know.
